Oregon story on Wikipedia’s front page

The article on D. B. Cooper, a famous airplane hijacker who vanished near Portland in 1971, is featured today on the front page of Wikipedia!

This is an article that was developed mostly by people who aren’t involved in WikiProject Oregon, but as a Featured Article, it’s been peer reviewed by the community as one of the finest articles on Wikipedia. (Only about 2,000 articles have reached that status, fewer than a dozen related to Oregon.)

It’s also the subject of an interesting little tale, told in a couple of posts on my blog. Briefly: a Wikipedia editor who had worked on the article bought a book from Amazon.com, only to find that the book was an exact reproduction of an earlier version of the Wikipedia article. This appears to be legal, but raises some interesting questions. After my first post, the owner of the publishing company called me to give me his side of the story; the second blog post covers that discussion. Take a look at the full story.

But apart from all that, big congrats to the authors of the Wikipedia article — great job!

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5 Responses to “Oregon story on Wikipedia’s front page”

D.B. Cooper is still an inspirational figure to the masses, in addition to his becoming something of a folk hero in the 1970s. The vandalism rate on this article became moderately high while it was on Wikipedia’s front page. Most vandals were “anonymous editors” inflicting infantile replacements. As an point of pride—and wiki tradition—the vandal fighters easily outgunned the vandals.
The D.B. Cooper article averaged roughly one edit per day up until about a week ago. This increased to about ten per day—probably in preparation for its promotion. During the 18 hours D.B. was on the front page, there were 229 edits, an average of just under 13 edits per hour.

Of these, 56 were acts of vandalism—such as deleting valuable contents, inserting curses or insults, or inexplicably, expressing a like for pie. Humans reverted the vandals 38 times, and anti-vandal robots 17 times, the latter effecting a complete repair in six seconds average. (38 + 17 = 55; the discrepancy is due to a revert which killed two birds with one stone.)

The really good news is that 118 edits were made to improve the article during this time, 26 edits by 19 distinct anonymous editors, and 92 edits by 61 different registered editors. One of these was a robot adding links to the corresponding article on the Spanish and Swedish Wikipedias. In all, the article is in sixteen languages—if one counts Simple English (useful for those who don’t easily read English).

It’s not clear if more congratulations are due for getting the article ready for Featured Article, or for maintaining and improving the article while it is Featured Article. Either way, it’s good.

The graph might be a bit confusing because May 30th’s hit count sets the scale, reducing all the other days to mere nubs. The graph shows that most days the article is retrieved less than a thousand times. For May 30th, it was read 239,500 times.
The history goes back only to December 2007, but has a fairly lumpy trend (number of reads per month):
December 2007: 105,750
January 2008: 31,088
February 2008: 175,734
March 2008: 76,780
April 2008: 269,003
May 2008: 676,708
It’s good to know that the efforts of editing are widely reaped!

A book published in August, 2008 gives an interesting new theory on D. B. Cooper. We wrote this book after a friend who admitted to be Cooper passed away in 2002. The twist to this story is that D. B. Cooper had gender reassignment surgery, survived the jump and died of natural causes. Though the story does not offer conclusive proof (the FBI somehow misplaced the dna profile from the Raleigh cigarettes) there is an amazing amount of circumstantial evidence to prove this theory. The book ends with a question, leaving the reader to judge for themselves.